Wondrous Skins and Tactile Affection: The Blemmye’s Touch

Abstract

Can “reading” skin let us touch it? Skin is, after all, both a medium for and a source of tactile sensation. Our own skin lets us be touched; the skin of others touches us. We can touch the things we read, and, as medievalists, some of the things we read really are skin. We are even talking more and more about the fact that parchment is skin.¹ Yet we’re not talking much about what this reading feels like, even though touching manuscripts can yield valuable information about the way they were read. Worn areas, for example, guide us to places where medieval readers most often ran their fingers along lines of text; particularly stiff leaves suggest neglect or disinterest. Already understudied, these haptic interactions with textual skins may be even harder to come by as quick access to digital images replaces expensive visits to archives. While I think it crucial to bear in mind that digitization reduces the multisensory experience of parchment to a largely monosensory one, it is also imperative, given our need to work with visual reproductions, that we think about ways in which visual texts can inform us about the other senses. I am referring here to both medieval senses as they may be theorized or represented by medieval texts and our own “other” senses when we are touched by the embodied textual artifact.²